Just adding to its resume

It's becoming increasingly difficult not to be impressed (or downright spooked) with the prediction engine behind Microsoft's Bing browser. For its latest feat, Bing successfully predicted most of the top winners for the 2015 Oscars, correctly identifying 20 of the 24 results for an 84 percent success rate. That alone is impressive, though it's just another notch in Bing's belt when it comes to predicting outcomes.

No big surprise

Lenovo's been in damage control ever since news broke that it was installing a careless piece of adware called Superfish onto consumer laptops and desktops, but the court of public opinion isn't the only one it has some explaining to do. According to reports, a class-action lawsuit against Lenovo and Superfish was filed at the end of last week claiming "fraudulent" business practices.

The first fix, issued in October, turned out to be a dud

The Samsung 840 Evo launched to some rave reviews in 2013. We gave it a “kick ass” 9 out of 10 and hailed it as “the fastest SSD we have ever tested by a sizable margin.” Unfortunately, some of that luster has since worn off, with a large number of 840 Evo owners reporting a serious decline in read performance of drives with several months’ of data on them. As for the firmware update and Performance Restoration Software that the company released in October to address the issue, they were apparently of very little help as the problem has resurfaced like a recrudescent cancer.

Gigabyte also tagged in proposed class-action lawsuit

The furor over GTX 970’s specs refuses to die down. What was until recently a public relations debacle is now threatening to snowball into a costly lawsuit, with a class-action complaint being filed Thursday by Cass County, Michigan-resident Andrew Ostrowski against Nvidia and Gigabyte for engaging “in a scheme to mislead consumers nationwide about the characteristics, qualities and benefits of the GTX 970.”

On Friday, a thread came up on the Norton Community forum from a user complaining of a Norton Internet Security (NIS) antivirus update breaking Internet Explorer on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. It soon swelled to multiple pages as droves of other users running Internet Explorer 9 and up on Windows Vista and up confirmed as much. Needless to say they were all very angry with an antivirus update, of all things, rendering a key software completely unusable (see what we did there?), and in some cases, forcing them to uninstall NIS.

Company believes move to 7nm possible without EUV

We are coming up on the semi-centennial anniversary of Moore’s law, a prediction in 1965 by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an (economical) integrated circuit would continue to double every 12 months until at least 1975, at which point he revised the rate of “circuit density-doubling” to 24 months. The prediction has held up rather well since then. But with all due respect to its remarkable longevity and massive impact on technology, the many physical limitations to transistor scaling at smaller nodes have led many to conclude the famous axiom is on borrowed time. Intel, however, looks determined to soldier on with Moore’s law beyond the 10nm node.

No more clockblocking with March update

Last week, Nvidia released a driver update that removed the ability for consumers to overclock their GeForce GTX 900M Series GPUs. The reason for this, the company explained, was that, “GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking.” Since then, there has been a general outcry from PC enthusiasts who might wish to overclock, or underclock, their mobile GPUs. In response, Nvidia has decided to restore the ability to overclock the GTX 900M series with a driver update that will be available in March.

More free storage

Like an overzealous patron at a gentlemen's club who just inherited a fortune, Microsoft can't help but to make it rain. Free storage, that is. It was only a week ago that Microsoft offered up 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage for a year for signing up for Bing Rewards, and now Microsoft is taking aim at Dropbox users with a similar deal -- 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage for a year simply for verifying their account.

Better fact check whatever your Comcast agent tells you

It's getting increasingly difficult not to get pissed off every time Comcast makes the news. This is one of only two companies that's been voted "The Worst Company in America" more than once by readers of Consumerist (Electronic Arts being the other), and it's because of the negative experiences that customers report, like a woman who received a bill addressed to "Super Bitch." Way to keep it classy, Comcast. These incidents aren't as rare as they should be, and if Comcast's agents aren't insulting their customers, they're spreading misinformation, like the Comcast rep who recently told a customer that data caps are mandated by law.

World's top PC supplier admits it "messed up"

Lenovo took to Twitter to issue an apology over Superfish, the visual search software it installed on consumer laptops and desktops without permission, and has posted instructions on how to remove it. Initially Lenovo issued a statement saying that it installed the software with good intentions and that there's nothing to be concerned about from a security perspective, though evidence points to the contrary.